still beating that 'spoiler effect' horse
This morning another letter arrived accusing Ralph Nader and the Green Party of putting George Bush in office. In '01 and '02 they were coming in every week. We still get them now and then.
It's a lie. The arithmetical arguments commonly made to support it are not valid because they begin with false assumptions. "If pigs could fly, I would be king." The sentence is true, but it doesn't tell you anything. "If Nader had not run, Gore would be president." Likewise. Nader ran. The universe where Nader did not run does not exist. It's a fantasy.
I believe the greatest single strategic mistake in the history of Green parties in the US was embracing that lie instead of forcefully rejecting and denying it. That decision allowed the Democratic Party to define the Green Party in the journalistic and public mind. Since then, almost every mainstream media story mentioning the Greens hangs on the "hook" that Nader put Bush in office It was a shortcut: look how powerful we are, to determine the outcome of a presidential election! Of course we didn't have anywhere near that kind of power. Embracing "the spoiler effect" was a disaster for us.
When you talk about the behavior of molecules of gas bouncing around in a bottle, you can assume they behave randomly. That is, you can write a mathematical function called a probability distribution which predicts the behavior of those molecules. Some go this way and some go the other way and it averages out. It is possible that all the molecules of air in the room where you are sitting might all go one way, and leave you to suffocate in a vacuum. But it is astronomically unlikely, according to that probability distribution. It's not an event you need to worry about. It won't happen. Mathematicians call the behavior of air molecules in a room a "linear" process.
People are not like molecules of a gas bouncing around in a bottle. Our behavior in reaction to singular or unusual events is not sufficiently predictable that a probability distribution can be written for it. Human history is not a linear process. Mathematicians call our kind of behavior chaotic and they have evolved chaos theory to model it.
Ralph Nader's 2000 campaign was one of those singular events. It affected so many things in so many ways that it cannot possibly be modeled mathematically. There is no "probably" about anything related to it. No "they probably would have voted for Gore." That's mathematical nonsense. You could say, with intellectual honesty, "they plausibly would have voted for Gore" because you would then be talking about your personal belief, based on faith, not some conclusion with mathematical basis. (And you'd be using that new part of speech, the sentence modifier. Hopefully you've heard of that by now.)
Gandhi recognized how history progresses around singular events. "Everything you do may seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." Most actions have no effect, but some actions have profound effect, and there is no way to tell which is which. This realization has been called "the butterfly effect," as in "the flapping of that butterfly's wings is the event that led to this hurricane." Weather is a chaotic system. Margaret Mead recognized it too. "Never doubt that a small group of determined people can change history. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has." But most groups of determined people fail to change history. Human history is a chaotic system.
The current time is a variable, in our universe, which moves monotonically forward. Ahead of it lies an infinite number of possible futures. That infinite number has a name, aleph-two. As far as I know, it is the largest number mathematicians have ever described. It is also the number of possible sets of points in any finite number of dimensions. Behind the current time lies one true history of the universe. Infinite futures, one past. This concept is known as time's arrow.
Back to that claim, "Gore would have won." In June of 1999, when Nader was deciding whether to run, there were aleph-two different possible ways (scenaria) that history could have unfolded. In some of them, Gore won. In some of them, Gore lost. In some, Gore won but the election was stolen by Bush. In some, Bush won but the election was stolen by Gore. In some, Gore won but the election was stolen by Nader! And it is a quirk of the arithmetic of infinite numbers that each of those sets of possible histories was the same size! Each of them held aleph-two possibilities.
So what is the mistake that the spoiler people make? They have an emotional preference for the scenaria where Gore wins. They pretend either the others didn't exist at all, or there were fewer of them. That's how they can use the word "probably" and believe they are making sense.
One of the greatest engineers I've ever worked with said, "Nature does not care what you think." Wishing the speed of light were faster or your software bugs will never show up has no effect. There is no place in mathematics for your emotional beliefs. And that is what the spoiler people are doing, wishing really hard that the universe worked differently.
It's counterintuitive, isn't it? In a vacuum, you can drop a feather and a bowling ball and they'll both fall at the same rate. That's counterintutive, too, but you know it's true. What's the difference? We don't have an army of unthinking political pundits telling us bowling balls fall faster.
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I'm no mathematician or physicist, but I have a similar opinion about the Nader effect.
I was living in Florida during the 2000 election, and I voted for Nader, since his policies most reflected my beliefs and concerns. If Nader had not been in the race, would I have voted for Gore instead? No: I would have simply not cast a vote for president. I know that most of my friends who voted Green that year would have done the same
For Democrats to assume that, absent Nader, my vote was theirs is arrogant and absurd.
The events back in 2000 were complex, and in hindsight we tend to forget some of the significant details about that election.
Tonight, for instance, while discussing the immigration issue with a couple of Oklahoma Greens, one mentioned that he knew Bush would win Florida when Elian Gonzalez was sent back to Cuba, because the roughly 10% of South Florida Cuban-Americans who normally would vote Democratic, would go with Bush, who, like his brother the Governor, were backing the Cuban community to keep the boy in the US. Being in Florida at that time, I had a flashback to that time, and that very volatile period. And that's pretty much what happened.
People choose who to vote for, for a lot of different reasons. I determined not to vote for Gore primarily because he chose Lieberman as his VP; it was a poor choice I'm sure he has long regretted, certainly lately, based on recent Lieberman behavior. Also on my mind were some of the horrific Clinton policies that Gore backed as VP and would continue as president. Like "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and NAFTA and "welfare reform."
Some Democrats seem to think that we were all just happy as clams under Clinton policies. We weren't, and that Bush's are even worse doesn't change the fact that Clinton was not only not progressive, he wasn't even a "liberal," despite what Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have been screaming for 20 years. He was no friend of labor, or the poor, or queers, or women (however you want to take it). The 2000 Gore was just more of the same -- he wasn't even fighting hard for his own pet issues, preferring to take the Clintonian path to the White House, with the DLC. Have I mentioned that he chose frickin' Lieberman for VP? How did that elevation of a sanctimonious, bleating, narcissist to the national stage work out for you Dems, hmm?
Dems raging about Nader also seem to forget the little fact that Gore won. He won the popular vote; more importantly, he won Florida, as the aborted ballot count was making clear. They never like to bring up the votes that registered Florida Dems cast for Bush and blame them for the Supreme Court appointing Bush.
Bottom line, an election is affected by a countless number of factors, as is the choice made by each individual voter. For (some) Democrats to keep this sour refrain going so long is just sad, and to me shows how unfocused their political mission really is. They would rather lash out over a past that can't be changed than to reach out to build a coalition to achieve mutual goals in the present and future.
I applaud and encourage Democrats who are working to take their party leftward, to build its progressive base. But I gave up on the Dems long before 2000, and I'm taking another path to save my country. The Nader- and Green-bashing ad nauseum just confirms my choice.
P.S. Post that letter!
I believe that here in South Carolina we are not percieved as a "spoiler" in part because we are not the lone rangers, The same was true of FL in 2000. Monica Morehead of the Worker's World Party won a larger vote total than the "difference" between Bush and Gore, so why isn't she the boogie man here?
It is worth noting that without IRV or some other voting reforms, my state has now elected a Superintendent of Schools by a minority of the state's voters. The vote was so close that the cumulative difference between the Dem and the 'Pub was far less than the votes won by the Green, Libertarian, Constitution, United Citizens and Independence Parties.
In a state legislative race the Democrat lost to the Republican in a three way race where the difference between those two was less than the vote total of the third. In this particular race, since the Republican was white and the Democrat and United Citizen nominee were black, I had assumed that there would be a back-lash, but I have seen nor heard of any.
To me, I approach each and every voter as if they have never heard of us, and where I live, that is almost always the truth. If they are activists of any stripe, they have an opinion of the Green Party. If they are regular folks living their lives as best they can, they likely have no opinion of us at all. We can form that opinion by how we behave both in and out of office.
I agree with everything you say here, Greg. One key has to be the manner in which Greens behave in local jurisdictions. While it may be a good thing to run for higher level political office. In fact, it may be necessary. But, the manner in which Greens acquire and then use local political power will be a major determinant of how they are perceived. In San Francisco, the manner in which first Matt Gonzales and now Ross Mirkarimi have behaved while in office goes a long way in creating the impression of Greens by the general electorate.
The best way to dispel the spoiler label is by winning local non-partisan elections and then acting as a true representative of the citizens... a long ignored special interest group.
"Anytime you have an opportunity to make things better and you don't, then you are wasting your time on this Earth" Roberto Clemente
"Monica Morehead of the Worker's World Party won a larger vote total than the "difference" between Bush and Gore, so why isn't she the boogie man here?"
In a way, that's a distraction from the real issue. The difference between Bush and Gore was much smaller than the margin of error in the balloting technology. In those cases, the outcome is random, or subject to undetectable tampering. The race should have been rerun with different equipment, because it was truly too close to call. It is not mathematically valid to claim a race was won by ten votes when there are a thousand ambiguously marked ballots.
That's a problem the advocates of paper-and-pencil voting can't solve. With paper and pencil, there will always be ambiguously marked ballots.
There are two ways to solve it: change the election law to recognize the too-close-to-call outcome, or use balloting technology that prevents ambigously marked ballots from being cast. The system advocated by Open Voting Consortium accomplishes the second.
Unfortunately, it is not really compatible with absentee voting. One of OVC's design goals was that ballots remain traceable, auditable, verifiable, but secret. Secret ballots are the only known way to prevent coercion and vote-buying. That's a serious problem with existing systems for absentee voting. Consider the company town, or soldiers voting from overseas.
Did anyone here read the diatribe against the Green Party on Daily Kos? I had to stop reading, it was making me so angry. Here's the link if you haven't read it yet:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2/26/13341/6397
is an Oklahoma Green who interacts quite a bit on DailyKos, and if you track responses to his comments (he rarely diaries), you will see all the venom the issue generates. Although, it might be that by sticking with it, and not letting them chase him off, he's persevered (longtime participants there have maybe given up trying to intimidate him).
I guess he does some good in terms of outreach on our issues, but I just can't take that kind of abuse on a regular basis, even as an observer.
(He does kindly link to this site in his DK signature, though. Thanks GreenSooner!)